At 17, Mojtaba Khamenei Built Network That Made Him Iran's Supreme Leader

In 1986, Mojtaba Khamenei volunteered for service in Iraq War. His father was then Iran's president and a close ally of Supreme Leader Khomeini.

12 Mar 2026, 16:07 · NDTV

On March 8 2026, ten days after US-Israeli strikes killed his father, Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed Iran's third supreme leader. At 56, he became the most powerful figure in a country of 90 million people, at war and under siege. He had never given a public speech. He had never held elected office.

But the foundations of his rise were laid quietly four decades ago.

In 1986, 17-year-old Mojtaba Khamenei volunteered for service in the Iran-Iraq War. His father, Ali Khamenei, was then Iran's president and a close ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The war was in its sixth year. Hundreds of thousands of people had already died.

“His Habib Battalion years bestow him with IRGC institutional backing. But Mojtaba's authority rests far more on security alignment than on public legitimacy or theological stature,” Daniel Herszberg, doctoral researcher, University of Oxford, told NDTV.

Mojtaba was assigned to the Habib ibn Mazahir Battalion of 27th Mohammad Rasulullah division, a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, deployed on the western front. The name of the battalion was not incidental. Habib ibn Mazahir al-Asadi was a companion of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who chose to stand and die alongside him at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE rather than abandon his friend.

Mojtaba served briefly. He saw real combat and reportedly went “missing” at one point during the recapture of Mehran. Then he came home. But this story is as much about Mojtaba as it is about the men he fought beside.

Four figures from that military division went on to shape the Islamic Republic's military in ways that would ultimately deliver Mojtaba to the supreme leadership.

Hossein Taeb joined the IRGC in 1982, four years before Mojtaba arrived at the front, and lost a brother in the fighting. After the war, his career nearly collapsed. He was pushed out of the Ministry of Intelligence for reportedly falsifying cases against the children of then-President Rafsanjani. It was his connection to the Khamenei family that rescued him.

Ali Khamenei, by then the supreme leader, found Taeb a position in his own office. Taeb went on to serve as commander of the Basij militia from 2007 to 2009, and then as the first-ever head of the IRGC's Intelligence Organisation from 2009 to 2022.

Hossein Nejat came next. A counter-intelligence officer during the war at the IRGC's Khatam ol-Anbia headquarters. From 2000 to 2010, he led the Vali Amr Corps, the unit personally responsible for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's physical protection.

He later became deputy chief of the IRGC Intelligence Organisation under Taeb, and was then appointed deputy commander of the Sarallah Headquarters, the IRGC's internal security command for Tehran, the force responsible for protecting the capital against uprisings, coups, and civil disorder. The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and Australia have all sanctioned him for his role in the crackdown on the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests.

Then there was Qasem Soleimani. His name needs less introduction than the others. He rose to command the Quds Force, the IRGC's external operations arm, which built and sustained Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and a network of armed groups across the Middle East that became known as the Axis of Resistance. He was the most powerful Iranian military figure of his generation. He was killed by a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on 3 January 2020.

Qasem Soleimani

Hossein Hamedani came up through the same division, the 27th Mohammad Rasulullah, as Mojtaba. He was one of the original founders of the IRGC after the 1979 revolution, fought through the Iran-Iraq War and later commanded all Iranian forces in Syria, where he propped up Bashar al-Assad's government during the civil war. He was killed in an airstrike near Aleppo in October 2015, one of the first senior IRGC generals to die in the Syrian conflict.

Four men. One killed by America, one killed in Syria. What connected them, beyond ideology, was their early bond with the son of the supreme leader.

Power Without A Title

For most of the years that followed the war, Mojtaba Khamenei existed in the background of Iranian public life. He held no government position. He gave no speeches. Only a handful of photographs of him have ever been published. Yet American diplomats, in cables later released by WikiLeaks, described him as “the power behind the robes”, a figure regarded as “capable and forceful” who controlled access to his father and shaped appointments within the system.

In 2019, the US Treasury placed him on its sanctions list under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump targeting the supreme leader's inner circle. The Treasury said he had been sanctioned for “representing the Supreme Leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father.” Washington accused him of working with the IRGC's Quds Force and the Basij militia to advance the regime's agenda at home and abroad.

Daniel Herszberg said the absence of a formal office was itself a form of power. “Mojtaba was influential precisely because he operated without formal office,” he says. “For years he was described as the gatekeeper to his father, controlling access, shaping appointments, and in doing so, consolidating ties with the IRGC and intelligence apparatus. The Supreme Leader stands above the entire system of governance, so controlling access to the top becomes a form of power or shadow authority in itself.”

His influence surfaced publicly during the 2005 presidential election that brought the hardline populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi accused "the master's son" Mojtaba of interfering through the IRGC and the Basij, alleging that money was distributed to religious groups to secure Ahmadinejad's victory. Karroubi wrote directly to the supreme leader. Ali Khamenei, rather than denying the accusation, rejected the framing, saying his son was “a master himself, not a master's son.”

Four years later, after Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election triggered the largest protests in the republic's history, the same accusations resurfaced. Taeb, Mojtaba's wartime associate, commanded the Basij during the crackdown. The protests were crushed. Their leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iran's last prime minister, was placed under house arrest in 2011 without charge, where he remains to this day.

When Mojtaba was appointed supreme leader on 8 March, the moment carried a contradiction that few observers missed. The Islamic Republic was founded on the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy. "Ayatollah Khomeini himself wrote that 'Islam proclaims monarchy and hereditary succession wrong and invalid' and described dynastic rule as a 'sinister, evil system of government'," Herszberg said.

A man rides a motorcycle past a banner displayed at Valiasr Square in central Tehran on March 10, 2026, depicting Iran's late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (L) watching as his successor the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (C) hands over a national flag to his son and new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei (R). Photo Credit: AFP

Herszberg described the succession as “an explosive betrayal of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology.” He added, “Revolutionary regimes derive legitimacy from change or rupture, breaking with the past. By returning to 2,500 years of Iranian history of hereditary succession, the appointment of Mojtaba collapses that rupture and replaces it with a new bloodline. Even among supporters of the Islamic Republic, I imagine this will be hard to reconcile with the revolution's founding ideals.”

According to reports from IranWire and Iran International TV, the IRGC pressured members of the Assembly of Experts through in-person visits and phone calls before the vote. The institution that chose Iran's supreme leader had been lobbied by the army that he himself served in.

“Security alignment can consolidate power in the short term,” Herszberg said. “But Mojtaba is being tested immediately by an existential war, a deep public legitimacy crisis, and an economic and environmental crisis. Whether that IRGC backing translates into durable leadership remains uncertain.”

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